<Begin Segment 9>

TI: So let's talk about Walnut Grove. We've talked a little about where you were located, which was in the Front, you know, Front Town of Walnut Grove. Let's talk a little bit about the whole town a little bit. So how, so there's a Japan neighborhood, tell me about the other neighborhoods in Walnut Grove.

LW: You mean the Chinatown?

TI: Yeah, just... yeah. You mentioned a white area, a Chinatown?

LW: Yeah, well, like across the street from my restaurant was the Chinatown, the whole block burned down in the fire, then they rebuilt it. But, see, when they rebuilt it, we were in camp most of the time, so we don't really remember. One by one, when I came back to visit Walnut Grove, there's a new building they built. It's kind of an empty lot there most of the places.

TI: So when we talk about the fire, so I'm aware of two different big fires. There was a big fire in 1915 that really burned a lot down.

LW: Yeah, see, I don't recall that.

TI: Yeah, and then, and that kind of moved things around. And then there was another big fire in the 1940s?

LW: Yeah, forty-something like that. That's the one that...

TI: And so that changed a lot of things.

LW: Wiped that whole Chinatown, yeah. In fact, if it wasn't for the wind shift, our whole restaurant would have burned down, too. Because you know how close it was across the street.

TI: But then eventually the restaurant did burn down?

LW: No, no.

TI: Oh, it didn't?

LW: No. I heard, I heard from somebody that, you know, what happened was they had to maybe condemn that building, the foundation was maybe... I don't recall at all.

TI: Oh, so that's why it's an empty lot now, was because it was just run down.

LW: So when I came back -- well, I didn't come back from camp until about ten years later. So actually, I don't really recall most of the things.

TI: Okay. Because I noticed, so it's not there anymore.

LW: And funny part of it, that you ask some people, they said, "Oh, that building's still there." But when I went to see it, that building was not there. They made a park out of it.

TI: So right across the street from your, from your restaurant was the start of Chinatown, so the Chinese area across the street.

LW: Yeah, on the other, southern part, south side.

TI: And when you were growing up, how large was the Chinese part of town compared to the...

LW: That was all the way from that theater up to our section there. They had a nice-sized Chinatown there.

TI: So was it as large as the Japanese area?

LW: About the same.

TI: In that front...

LW: Of the front area, front area.

TI: And so population-wise, there were...

LW: But more Japanese than Chinese. Like I was telling you, the front area is where the business people, and the back was for the residents, and there were quite a few people that lived right there.

TI: And the Chinese were kind of like, similar to the front area in terms of size.

LW: Yeah, that's it, yeah. Not in the back where that school was, you know, the Oriental School, that used to be a farming area. It was wide open there. Then there's Locke, where we had dinner, that's another, what they call another Chinatown.

TI: Which isn't too far away, it's like about a mile or so away.

LW: Yeah. We used to walk up to there, yeah.

TI: But back to Walnut Grove, so would the Chinese population be about, what, a third?

LW: Well, if they combined it'll be more than Japanese.

TI: Oh, with Locke and the...

LW: Yeah, because Locke itself, I think, we didn't get to see, but it goes pretty deep back there. It's mostly residential area, I think, just the front.

TI: So even though the population then were kind of, there were more, let's go to the school then. At the Oriental School, my understanding is there were more Japanese than Chinese? So there was like about seventy percent Japanese and thirty percent Chinese?

LW: Yeah, something like that.

TI: So if the populations were about, or if there were more Chinese, why were there more Japanese children than Chinese children?

LW: Well, only thing I recall is there were a lot of Chinese people. I guess they must have moved around. Because you hear about those Chinese labor camp in Sacramento where they go work out in the railroads, there's not much job for them, right? Whereas in Japanese town, most of the farmers, Japanese were farmers, and then they hired Japanese people to work there.

TI: Well, I was wondering, too, in terms of the family composition, if there's a difference in terms of, did the Japanese community have more family units than the Chinese? I've read that a lot of times, there were a lot more Chinese bachelors than Japan, or did you feel that in Locke and Walnut Grove?

LW: Well, I think Japanese was more closely-knitted family, I think, business-wise and community activities. Because we used to have that hall that was burned down, and that's where they, Japanese people used to have those New Year's parties and the movie house there, and the play, Japanese play, they used to have it in there. But when that burned down, that kind of, take quite a bit out of it. So only thing they have was the Buddhist church and the United Methodist church there.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.